A Cold Warrior was faced
with handling the Soviet Threat. There were different approaches to dealing
with this threat and disagreements among Cold Warriors. Brzezinski opposed the
right-wing policy of “rollback,” that is, the use of force or the threat of
force to force the Soviet Union to change its policies and to give up its
advances. Brzezinski believed that America’s strength was its reputation as a
liberal democracy and that the US government should use ideas, such as human
rights and international law, as its principal weapons in the Cold War.

The Neoconservatives were
boosted to power by the Soviet collapse which removed all constraint on US
unilateralism and made the US the Uni-power. The neocons are advocates of using
this power to achieve US world hegemony. This is different from Brzezinski’s
idea of US primacy. Primacy is not the same as hegemony. Primacy does not mean
that there are no other powers or that all other countries answer to
Washington. Primacy is determined by who has the most standing, the most
influence. For Brzezinski, it was better that the US had primacy than for the
Russians to have primacy.

Essentially, Brzezinski’s
life as a Cold Warrior ended with the Soviet collapse. But it is difficult for
a prominant strategic policymaker to recede into the woodwork. Brzezinski could
not stay relevant without a Russian threat. In latter works, such as The
Grand Chessboard published in 1997 six years after the collapse of the
Soviet Union, Brzezinski focuses on preventing a Russian resurgence by
achieving US inroads into Eurasia that would confine Russia to its post-Soviet
size. His purpose was to prevent the possibility of a Russian comeback on the
world stage as a rival for primacy.

The Grand Chessboard made
him appear to some to be a neoconservative of sorts. But this was not the case.
He opposed the neoconservative 2003 invasion of Iraq. He damned the
neoconservative foreign policy of George W. Bush as a catastrophe that severely
damaged America’s reputation, and he expressed his contempt for Tony Blair, the
UK PM who helped Bush rig the excuse for the invasion.

The notion that Brzezinski
is the creater of terrorism because the Carter administration armed the
mujahideen in response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan is absurd. The
mujahideen were not terrorists. They were Muslims fighting Soviet invaders.The
Taliban are not terrorists. They are fighting for an Islamic state in
Afghanistan. It was the US invasion of Afghanistan that initiated the American
conflict with the Taliban.

Brzezinski did not invade,
attack, or kill any Muslims.But the Neoconservatives using Bush, Blair, and
NATO have destroyed in whole or part seven countries, killing, maiming, and
displacing millions of Muslims. It is extraordinary how little terrorism this
massive crime against Muslims has caused. All of the terrorism is the terrorism
of the Western alliance against Muslims in seven countries.

According to the Israelis,
Palestinians have been terrorizing innocent Jews since the 1940s. If true, all
to no effect as Palestine literally no longer exists. Indeed, Palestine is now
a ghetto routinely terrorized by Israel. Did Brzezinski cause this also?